One Hand Jerking (12 page)

And, just in case you guys at the DEA missed it, a guest on
Late Night
gave Conan O'Brien a beautiful bong, and he kept it! Hurry, it's still in his possession. He plans to use it as a glass-eye holder, but that doesn't matter, you can still bust him.

The cruel absurdity of anti-paraphernalia laws is underscored by the creative substitutes, such as apples, soda cans, toilet-paper cardboard tubes and aluminum foil, tweezers used as roach clips, and don't forget those plain old, regular
tobacco
pipes. Indeed, in Fulton, Kentucky, police investigating a marijuana-smoking complaint, found pot burning on a backyard grill with a large fan on the other side of the house, sucking the smoke through the home, in effect, said the police chief, “turning the house into a large marijuana bong.” Seize it immediately, boys!

At a press conference announcing the February raids, Attorney General John Ashcroft went out of his way to praise the DEA, which had been criticized earlier this year, in a White House budget office assessment of government performance, as being “unable to demonstrate its progress.” Yes, the business of America is indeed business, and all that those DEA agents ultimately want is simply to keep their jobs.

As I write this, the trial of Ira Einhorn for the murder of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, is scheduled to begin. I have no doubt that he did it, but whatever the verdict, here are several facts, most of which will not be revealed in the courtroom.

Einhorn claims that the CIA framed him because he knew too much about
mind-control technology, top secret weapons and unidentified flying objects. Yet they didn't assassinate
him
. Instead, he insists, they bludgeoned
her
to death, stuffing her body into a padlocked steamer trunk in a locked closet in his apartment.

Downstairs neighbors complained that “bodily fluids” were seeping down through their ceiling and staining their kitchen wall. Einhorn never investigated the godawful smell in his own apartment during the 18 months before he was apprehended. But why bother? He already knew that the stench was caused by her decomposing remains. One witness heard noisy thumps and a scream around the time Maddux disappeared. Another was asked by Einhorn to help him dump the trunk, explaining that it contained “top secret” documents.

Einhorn had a reputation for being violent toward women. I was tripping on LSD the day I met him in 1968, and he reeked with vibes of manipulation. Later on, I dated one of his former girlfriends, and she verified for me what an egomaniacal control freak he had been.

The media reported that he founded Earth Day and was the master of ceremonies at their event in Philadelphia. In reality, his mission there was to seize the microphone and proceed to hog it for half an hour. This so-called hippie guru was really an opportunistic scam artist. He became the New Age advisor to mainstream powermongers, consulting with corporations and politicians alike.

His $40,000 bail money, which he jumped on the eve of his first pre-trial hearing, was put up and sacrificed by Seagram heiress Barbara Bronfman. She sent him thousands more while he was on the lam, and alerted him when authorities were closing in. She was not charged with aiding and abetting a fugitive. Einhorn claimed that the reason he fled the United States was because he would not have received a fair hearing since he had once organized demonstrations against the Vietnam war.

When the way was cleared for his extradition from France, he slashed his neck with a dull bread-knife. There were superficial cuts but heavy bleeding. He was in and out of the emergency room, his wound considered not life-threatening. Coincidentally, a psychiatrist on
The Sopranos
described such an act as a “suicidal
gesture
as opposed to a suicidal
attempt
—‘small cutting' is the clinical term.”

After Einhorn was back behind bars, the
Philadelphia Daily News
published an article:

“Right about now, those prized Jersey beefsteak tomatoes are maturing into plump, succulent fruits ripe for the picking. We recommend you leave them on the vine just a little bit longer . . . when they will be finished growing. And ready
for throwing. By then, they should be overripe, thin-skinned, seedy, worm-ravaged, and perhaps even a little smelly, just like some ex-fugitive-murderer we all know: Ira ‘The Blade' Einhorn. You can still take a shot at a reasonable facsimile of his smug mug laid out on a giant billboard. That's right, the second annual Ira Einhorn ‘Killer Tomato' contest is less than two weeks away. . . .

“Owner of the homegrown tomato that best exhibits the characteristics of the killer—thin-skinned, ripe-smelling and seedy—wins a trip to Alcatraz. Others presenting tomatoes get a chance to toss their fruit at the billboard.”

In response to a column in the
News
, local radio host Bob Rowell wrote:

“Einhorn got a brief taste of the media limelight during the first Earth Day event, but was anything but a ‘counterculture hero' or ‘darling of the left.' Even before the murder, he was widely perceived to be insincere, phony and a con. The column was obviously a cheap shot at a subculture that the writer clearly despises. Einhorn and Manson were two murderers who were never embraced by the counterculture. Actually, they had much more in common with the
contras
and homicidal elements of some law enforcement entities.”

Time
magazine published a photo of Einhorn with Abbie Hoffman, proclaiming them to be friends. Not true. They met only once, at a 1968 conference of college newspaper editors in Washington. However, Einhorn did cultivate a relationship with Hoffman's co-founder of the Yippies, Jerry Rubin. Anita Hoffman, the keeper of Abbie's image, wrote a letter of complaint to
Time
.

An episode of
South Park
included a character that was openly a parody of Einhorn, repeatedly warning that “Republicans are ruining the world,” and using brainwashing techniques to force children into celebrating Earth Day. Later, he chops a young child to pieces. Yes, “the bastard killed Kenny!”

Among David Letterman's
Top 10 Reasons to Flee
was this one: “If your new roommate says, ‘No matter what you hear, don't open this trunk.'”

While teaching an alternative education course in the 1960s at the University of Pennsylvania, Einhorn once stripped naked and danced in the classroom after passing around marijuana to the students.

And finally, his ironic and irrelevant position on the drug war: “SWAT teams are not the solution to soft drugs. Compassion must rule wherein medical marijuana is concerned. Hemp should flourish, along with free energy and the UFO information that would allow people to create it.”

Postscript
: Ira Einhorn was found guilty by a jury, and he is currently serving a life sentence.

At first I thought the Oregon Country Fair would be like a mainstream state fair, with greased pigs and gigantic tomatoes and bumper cars. But I was wrong. This was the 33rd annual fair, celebrating the continuity of countercultural values, a weekend oasis at lush campgrounds near Eugene, peaking with 18,000 attendees.

It was the first year that there would be speakers in addition to music, crafts, food and creative tomfoolery. A headline in the statewide daily, the
Oregonian
, announced: “Ram Dass, Krassner Will Talk at Country Fair.” The article included the following:

“Ram Dass, the former Harvard psychologist who became a psychedelic pioneer and an admired spiritual teacher, will speak at the fair at 1:45 p.m. Sunday. Paul Krassner, a writer and comic who says he's taken LSD with Ken Kesey, Dass, Timothy Leary and Groucho Marx (among many others), also will speak on Sunday afternoon and is scheduled to introduce Dass. That could be interesting, especially because a note on Dass' Web site takes issue with a recent profile of Dass that Krassner wrote for
High Times
magazine. In it, Krassner wrote that Dass has retracted a story about how Dass once gave Maharaj Ji (his guru) a high dose of LSD and nothing happened.

“‘Just to set the record straight,' reads the note on the Web site, ‘it is Krassner's's allegation which was fiction. Ram Dass was shocked by the statement in the article, and vehemently denies it. Krassner attributes the statement to some unnamed source, and admits that he did not check it with Ram Dass before publication. ' In other words, Dass says he did not give Maharaj Ji a high dose of LSD and nothing happened. The amazing thing about this episode is not that these people are arguing about who gave how much LSD to whom, but that they can even remember any of it.”

Ram Dass and I have been friends for four decades, and I wrote a personal apology to him—“I hope you understand that in the context of a totally positive article, my intention was to reveal what I thought was a true example of the rascal aspect of your personality”—and a public retraction in
High Times
. We hadn't crossed paths since, and now I was slightly nervous, but he greeted me with a smile and a warm embrace.

“I know you love me,” I said, “but do you forgive me?”

Ram Dass laughed and replied, “There's nothing to forgive.”

He re-tells that story about giving acid to his guru in an illuminating 2002 documentary,
Ram Dass: Fierce Grace
. Producer-director Mickey Lemle says, “When I first met Ram Dass 25 years ago, one of his messages that touched me was that we are both human and divine and that we must hold both simultaneously. He would explain that if one goes too far in the direction of one's humanity, one suffers. If one goes too far in the direction of one's divinity, one runs the risk of forgetting one's postal [Zip] code.

“So his stories and teachings were funny, self-effacing, and with an extraordinary grasp of the metaphysical. In form and content, his stories are about living on those two planes of consciousness, and the tension between them. His explorations took an univited turn when he suffered a massive stroke in February 1997. Now, he has been forced to live his teachings in a way he had not expected. He uses his current predicament to help others—one can see why he is considered one of the great spiritual teachers of our time, and how he is able to see his stroke as grace,
fierce grace
.”

In the documentary, Ram Dass comments: “This isn't who I expected to be—my expectation didn't have this stroke in it. Suffering comes when you try to hold onto continuity. I can't shift my car. It's so captivating to the consciousness, like I wanna see how the stroke capitulates my mind and then I wanna pull my consciousness out and be free in the middle of the stroke—an experiment in consciousness.

“I feel like an advance guard that calls back to the baby boomers, and now I call back about aging and things like stroke that are going to be in their present much sooner than they think. . . . My guru said suffering brings me so close to God. I was galumphing through life before the stroke, and I kind of thought that was it, that was all there was, but the stroke, it's like a whole new incarnation.”

At the country fair, on stage in his wheelchair, Ram Dass talked about his current struggle to love George W. Bush, and I had a flashback to thirty years ago, when he talked about his struggle to love Richard Nixon. He explained that he loves Bush's
soul
and that Bush just happened to get a terrible incarnation this time around.

Ram Dass advised the audience to “take the ambiance of this fair into our lives because the instrument of greatest social action is the individual heart. Heart to heart rescusitation.”

At dinner, he described the fair as resembling “a medieval village.”

“Except,” I observed, “there are hippies with cell phones.”

In fact, a group of environmentalists were walking around the campgrounds with a placard: “No Fair for Cell Phones Near Schools and Homes.” They went past a woman who was talking on a cell phone, but she stopped for a brief moment.

“No worries,” she assured the group, “I am not a school or a house.”

Organizer Laura Stewart told me. “This event is definitely into its second and third generation. Children learn that it is okay to have fun with their parents, be passionate about life, and live with an open heart. The bliss from the Oregon County Fair flows into the surrounding communities all year round. Those who participate know that we are not alone in our beliefs and values. We are stronger, louder and more visible because of our unity in celebration.”

This particular year, the fair had a theme: to honor the memory of Ken Kesey.

“There are those,” I told the audience, “who now envision Kesey on that Great Psychedelic Bus in the Sky, with Neal Cassady at the wheel, Jerry Garcia on guitar, and Timothy Leary on acid. But Kesey's little grandchild, upon learning of his death, only wondered, ‘Now who will teach us how to hypnotize the chickens? '”

The Merry Pranksters had parked the descendant of their psychedelic bus, “Furthur,” outside the entrance, and they were selling posters to help raise money for a statue of Kesey in the town square. There were two factions in Eugene. One wanted the statue to be Kesey sitting on a bench, reading a book to his three grandchildren. The other wanted the statue to be Kesey sitting on a bench, toking on a joint. The first statue won out.

“I don't care,” insists the sculptor of the pot-smoking statue. “I'm gonna do it anyway.”

This is for Ronald Castle, Sr., a supervisor with the Department of Social Services in upstate New York. A county employee for more than 30 years, he has been indefinitely suspended without pay while he is under investigation for harassment, criminal nuisance and public lewdness. He had been masturbating into the coffee cups of fellow employees. It gives new meaning to an old romantic song, “You're the Cream in My Coffee.” Plus, Ronald Castle,
Jr.
is blessed with a renewed sense of gratitude that he is alive today, instead of having been burned to death at the moment of ejaculation and then swallowed by some unknowing caffeine addict.